The Detail of Moment/The Moment of Detail

            When I first met Jo Ann Beard, her demeanor surprised me. She was quiet, reserved, and in constant thought. Her speech was deliberate-- you could almost see her thoughts forming as she searched the air for what she wanted to say. During the week I spent with her, she spoke of the importance of trusting the reader, trusting your own mind, and most importantly, the power of moments. She had us read many short pieces of nonfiction that were based on singular moments that retained all their emotional resonance. I thought I understood what she was talking about, but I didn’t fully until a moment during the following week:

As I drive to school, my boyfriend texts me saying that our dog, Sidney, has had a stroke. I press him for details to make sure it's not just an allergy attack, which she's had a few times this past year. But the more he tells me, the more obvious it becomes. I speed down 95 fighting the urge to cry. 16 years old now, we'd rescued her from an abusive home years ago, and we'd always commented that she'd saved her youth for her aged years. That she must have been the runt because she was small enough to be a large teacup, and large enough to be a small miniature. Tears well up in my eyes. Her white fur, her front legs imperfect, bowed out like a bulldog’s. My mom hated the poodle cut, so we always gave her a puppy cut. When she was completely shaved, she looked like Dobby the House Elf, when her hair got too long, she looked like a Muppet. My mom had adopted her when I went away for my first year of college, her empty nest syndrome replacement for me. My mom’s fiancé didn’t like pets, so I'd taken over care of Sid for her final three years. For a while it was she and I, alone in the house. We depended on each other.

           

My mom moved back home a month before Sidney had her stroke. Jo Ann Beard's ideas were still reverberating loudly in my mind. I wanted to spend my time reading and writing, but my mom interrupted everything. Tensions flared. Emotions frayed. Her passive aggressive, cutting comments needled me. It hadn’t been a week and I already wanted her gone. I resented how she was treating me like a moving service; she undid anything I started in the house, she took over, and she wasn’t sorry about it. Then, Sidney happened:

           

I come home that night, and my mom is standing in a room she'd re-carpeted during the sudden move. She and my grandma had torn down wallpaper, sanded, and repainted. The walls are now a beach sand color, but the baseboards are still a palm frond green, a remnant from my childhood. The room is otherwise empty. She stands in the dead center, arms crossed, staring into an empty corner. I lean against the doorframe, feeling the vacuum Sidney left behind. My mom eventually turns around and we chat. First about the move, and then the work she'd done on the empty room; anything, really, except Sidney.

Finally, she fills me in. She'd been getting ready when she'd heard Sid’s nails scratch irregularly on the tile. She'd stepped into the hall and saw Sid, her neck contorted back, convulsing on the floor. She picked her up to comfort her, also trying to comfort herself. She explains how she had felt Sid’s tiny body go rigid, her neck stiff and little legs locked. All she could do was stand there, trying to comfort her, crying. When the episode was over, Sid started wailing, unsure of what just happened. This only instigated more sobs from my mom.

Here in the empty room, I listen to my mom, fighting back my own tears. We avoid eye contact. After Sid's seizure, my mom had stayed home, watching her walk crookedly, bumping into everything, falling over. I bite my lower lip and turn my head, looking out into the hall. When she took Sid to the vet, the doctor said she could live a happy life after the stroke, but in his professional opinion, it was time. My mom is crying again. We stand, completely at odds, avoiding each other, watching one another fall apart. She'd stayed the entire time. The vet commented that people usually only stay until their pet is anesthetized. My mom had stayed until Sid was completely gone; she explains to me that she wouldn’t have been able to live with herself if there was any minuscule chance Sid could still sense her presence. This gets me. I can’t hold it back any longer, no amount of chewing my lower lip can stop the deluge. This prompts my mom to keen with me. I grab tissues for both of us. One tug and the box is empty; two tissues are all that is left, and they are both in my hand. My mom and I spend the rest of the night standing in the incomplete room, sobbing into each other’s shoulders.

This moment would have been lost to me, but Jo Ann, still ringing in my mind, enhanced it for me. The details stick out-- there's no way to ignore them. The last two tissues, the incomplete room, the tension between my mom and myself, the remaining green paint from my childhood bedroom. They all add to the moment, are each somehow necessary, and I see that we weren’t only crying over the sudden deterioration of Sidney, but also our deteriorating relationship.

And Jo Ann Beard gave all of this to me.

Scott Rachesky is a first year MFA fiction candidate at FAU. Aside from singing Carmina Burana in community choir, being a photographer, solving imaginary murders,  and raising Unipegs, he enjoys to write…go figure. His writerly influences include Chuck Palahniuk, Jennifer Egan, Lori Moore, and Joseph Heller. Some people have described his writing style as similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald, but he doesn’t believe those people and thinks they only make the connection because of the shared name of Scott.

Double-blind

Writers have a unique power that if not used for good can have everlasting consequences. Right now I have you hooked; you keep reading because you want me to tell you what I have to say. This is the power I speak of. You as the reader trust me. You've never met me. I could be an escaped goldfish from a mad scientist’s lab, but you think I’m a good person. You believe I have something important I need to say. You believe I won’t lead you astray. Readers go into a story with blind trust, the instinct to believe what the narrator is saying. This is a noble instinct. Something poetic could be said about the inherent good in people as seen by their immediate need to believe or trust in something or someone they’ve never met. Look at politics. We want to believe politicians all the time. Some of us do.

When a reader encounters an unreliable narrator, there is a fascination with being beguiled or lead to believe a very limited point of view. Perhaps right now you think of an unreliable narrator as a criminal or evil person. However, the truth is that everyone thinks they are the good guys despite what they do or say. Hitler thought he was doing everyone a favor. He was deluded and evil in his methodology and thinking, but the point is that unreliable narrators usually think they are on the right side of history. They honestly believe they are correct. This is what makes them so good at deceiving; they believe, so we then believe. We now have the perfect recipe for crafting an unreliable narrator: the trust of the reader and the narrator’s desire to be right. Stephen King writes that “the trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.” In this case, the writer creating the narrator is the liar and the innocent is the reader. This is also a limited view of what an unreliable narrator is, so let’s broaden the definition.

One of the most attractive qualities about the use of an unreliable narrator is that they are shape shifters. They come in many different forms. Imagine the Harry Potter novels rewritten through the point of view of a Death Eater or The Catcher in the Rye as told by Holden’s parents. We would see Harry as a vile creature who keeps trying to thwart Voldemort’s plan to bring harmony to the wizarding world, and Holden would just be a whiney child who hates life. Point of view is one of the most important parts of the story. The point of view shapes the lens through which we see the world of the story.

So, should a child be considered an unreliable narrator? Yes, because they have a limited worldview. Holden Caulfield is considered unreliable because he believes the world is out to get him and he hates everyone. In the novel Room by Emma Donoghue, the narrator is a five year-old named Jack who has been locked in one room with his mother for his entire life. His unreliability is unintentional, but he is unreliable nonetheless. Lolita is perhaps the most famous example and uses an unreliable narrator that tries to cloud the immoral and justify his actions. In Gone Girl the reader encounters two conflicting points of view without knowing which to believe. When the trustworthy perspective is eventually revealed, we can still see how the unreliable character feels his or her actions are completely justified. There are also instances of perception being altered by drugs and alcohol. These narrators aren’t intentionally unreliable, but they don’t know better because they are inebriated. This raises a larger question: can any narrator—particularly a first person narrator—be reliable?

Now, you have journeyed with me for almost 700 words and you want to trust what I’ve just told you. Could I have made everything up because I hit a deadline and needed something to write? Could I have copied everything I needed from Wikipedia and passed it along as my own? The truth is, you can’t know. But you want to believe me because why would a narrator lie to you?

Scott Rachesky is a first year MFA fiction candidate at FAU. Aside from singing Carmina Burana in community choir, being a photographer, solving imaginary murders,  and raising Unipegs, he enjoys to write…go figure. His writerly influences include Chuck Palahniuk, Jennifer Egan, Lori Moore, and Joseph Heller. Some people have described his writing style as similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald, but he doesn’t believe those people and thinks they only make the connection because of the shared name of Scott.